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The semester is almost over and most of my Introduction to US Government students have completed their assignment to submit interesting news items they have found during their weekly reading. A few are still turning in their last items and this week Freda Pu.

Like a number of jurisdictions, Fort Lauderdale, FL has recently passed ordinances restricting the activities of charities or individuals, many of them religiously inspired, who have programs to feed homeless people in their communities.

It will be interesting to see if ordinances like Fort Lauderdale’s, which aims to disperse programs that provide food in public outdoor locations, will be challenged on “free exercise” of religions grounds. Florida has an almost 20 year old RFRA (Religious Freedom Restoration Act) which prohibits the state from imposing excessive burdens on the exercise of religion.

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As the semester begins to wind down, the politics stories submitted by the students in POLS 041 seem to be more interesting week to week.

The week’s feature submission comes from Kaori Kubo, an international student from Japan. Kaori has frequently given us a useful “outsider’s” perspective on the American political system.

Kaori sent us a recent “Mischief of Faction” post entitled “The Dark Campaign Web Rises.” The post written by Jennifer Victor compares how official campaigns are financed with the fairly unregulated role of Super-PACs and 501(c)(4) organizations.

The official campaign finance regulations are nicely summarized on the FEC website. But we must remember that modern campaigns have two sides–the official campaign, which is organized by the candidate and receives regulated donations from many sources, and the unofficial campaign, which has always existed in some way but has been growing and was given new life under the 2010 Citizen’s United decision and the decisions that followed it. The key in campaign finance law is that the unofficial campaign cannot, technically, coordinate with the official campaign. In essence, if the Mickey Mouse Campaign for state cat-catcher communicates with a supporting super PAC about what message to use, which markets to buy ads in, etc, the coordination constitutes a contribution to the campaign and is therefore limited by law. The only way the Super PAC can receive unlimited donations is if it does not coordinate with the campaign. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert famously ridiculed this rule.

The split-level character of current campaign finance is shown below:

2016 will tell a lot about the relationship between official and unofficial campaigns.

Turnout is higher in states that allow voters to register on Election Day. Despite fears over administrative difficulties, surveys show that polling place wait times are actually shorter in states with election-day registration than in the rest of the country. Fears of voter fraud are sometimes cited as a reason against allowing election-day registration. But all of the research shows that voter fraud is extremely rare.

Perhaps just as interesting as Street’s conclusion is how he reached it. To estimate the number of additional voters who might have participated in the 2012 election, he used the number of Google searches for the phrase “voter registration” in the period leading up to election day 2012.

To estimate the relationship between searching online, and actually registering, we turned to state records of registered voters. The data confirm that, in the period leading up to voter registration deadlines, the daily number of Google searches in each state was closely related to the daily number who registered. If the same pattern had been allowed to continue up to Election Day, millions more Americans would have registered in time to vote.

Technological advances make it possible effectively to extend voter registration deadlines to election day, and technology, in the form of Google, helps us see that doing so would likely improve voter turnout.

An article in The Fix argued that mandatory voting might have changed the results in a number of states in the 2012 presidential election.

On the other hand, a Monkey Blog post held that mandatory voting would have little impact on electoral outcomes for a variety of reasons.

While mandatory voting ceteris paribus might not change the outcomes of many elections, it almost certainly would change campaign strategies and tactics, and other aspects of electoral politics.

More controversial is whether mandatory voting would be an oppressive violation of citizens’ freedom. Other responsibilities of citizenship are mandatory (paying taxes, jury duty, etc.). Why not voting?

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We are on Spring Break now, so I was tempted not to post a POLS 041 student submission this week. Happily, Kaori Kubo found a gem of an article that I could not resist sharing.

While most of my students this week found articles discussing Hillary Clinton’s email difficulties and what they may suggest about her presidential possibilities, Kaori discovered this delightful article exploring a facet of the attitudinal differences separating Democrats and Republicans.

According a recent Yougov poll, 43% of Republicans say that they would survive longer than most people in their community in the event of an apocalyptic collapse. That’s roughly twice the rate of Democrats.

While both sets of partisans are worried about nuclear war causing the apocalypse, Democrats are more likely to worry about catastrophic climate change bringing the end of the world. Republicans tend to focus on Judgment Day as the cause of the end times.

On a personal note, writing this post taught me that I drink like a Democrat, own pets like a Republican, and watch TV on a strictly bipartisan basis. There is not a red Hulu Plus and a blue Hulu Plus . . .

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Time again for our weekly contribution from an introductory political science student. This week Claudia Valencia offers this National Journal article suggesting that Hillary R. Clinton isn’t quite the slam dunk to be elected president in 2016 that some in the media may incline us to believe.

The point has been made many times by now, but unlike journalists who often focus on personalities and the short-term events of campaigns (who won the straw poll at CPAC now?), political scientists try to isolate the fundamental factors affecting how people vote.

But political scientists who specialize in presidential-race forecasts aren’t relying on their guts. They’ve built statistical models that draw on the history of modern presidential campaigns (since Harry Truman’s reelection in 1948) to determine with startling accuracy the outcome of the next White House contest.

Political scientists may not tell the most colorful stories, but they are likely to help you keep your eye on the critical fundamentals.